The Seven Madmen (20 page)

The Major moved his boots out of the sunlight and went on:

"Right, the military steps in. We'll say that, given the government's inability to defend the Nation, Free Enterprise, and the Family, we're taking over the reins and declaring a temporary dictatorship. All dictatorships are temporary, it has a reassuring sound to it. Bourgeois capitalists and, especially, conservative foreign governments, will immediately salute the new state of things. We'll say it's all the fault of the Soviets that we have to crack down and shoot a few poor slobs who've confessed and been found guilty of bomb making. We'll disband the legislature and make big cutbacks in the nation's budget. The running of the state will be placed in the hands of the military. The nation will be on its way to unprecedented heights of glory."

The Major concluded there, and in the flower-laden summerhouse the men broke into applause. It startled a pigeon into flight.

"Your concept is splendid," said Erdosain, "but it has it so we'll all be working for you people—"

"But didn't you want to be in power?"

"Well, yes, only we'll be getting the crumbs from your banquet—"

"No, sir
...
you haven't grasped
...
the thing is—"

The Astrologer cut in:

"Gentlemen
...
we haven't come here to argue over matters we haven't even come to yet—we have to get the activities of the cell leaders mapped out. So, if you're ready, let's get to it."

A sturdy young fellow who had been silent all this time joined in the discussion.

"May I say something?"

"Go ahead."

"Well to me we have just one big question: do you or don't you want a revolution? The organizational details should come later."

"Right
...
right, later on
...
yes, sir."

The stranger went on to explain:

"I'm Mr. Haffner's friend. I'm a lawyer. Because of my opposition to the capitalist system, I've chosen not to practice my profession for personal profit. Am I or am I not entitled to speak my mind?"

"Yes, sir, go right ahead."

"Well then I'd like to point out that what the Major proposes would turn our organization into something completely different."

"No," objected the Gold Seeker. "We can use his plan as a starting point without sacrificing our principles."

"Of course."

"Right."

It was about to break out all over again. The Astrologer got up:

"Gentlemen, we'll leave this for later. Now we need to get the business end of it worked out—not the ideas. So let's table all other business for now."

"That's dictatorship," the lawyer burst out.

The Astrologer looked at him a moment, then said parsimoniously:

"You think you're a born leader, I see
...
I think you're right. If you're smart, then, you'll go off and start your own conspiracy someplace else. It'll be another blow against the status quo. Here you do as I say or leave."

The two eyed each other an instant; the lawyer got up, looked hard at the Astrologer, bowed, and smiled like a strong-willed man, and left.

The Major was the first to break the silence:

"You handled that very well. Discipline is everything here. We'll hear you out."

Diamond patches of sunlight created a golden mosaic on the black earthen floor. The anvil of some far-off blacksmith clanged away, innumerable songbirds filled their throats with music in the branches. Erdosain sucked on a white honeysuckle blossom and the Gold Seeker, elbows on his knees, gazed keenly at the floor.

The Ruffian was smoking and Erdosain observing the Astrologer's Asian face, which surmounted a gray smock buttoned up to the chin.

An uncomfortable silence followed these words. What did this new fellow want? Erdosain, suddenly angry, got up, exclaiming:

"You can have as much discipline here as you feel like, but all this talk about military dictatorship is absurd, for us. All we care about is if the military can go Red."

The Major sat up in his seat and, looking at Erdosain, said with a smile:

"So I'm convincing in my role, then?"

"In your role?"

"Right—I'm no more a major than you are."

"Now you see how powerful a lie can be?" said the Astrologer. "I dressed up this friend of mine as an officer and here you thought, even though you were practically in on the secret, that we had a revolution underway within the ranks."
{9}

"So?"

"This was just a dress rehearsal
...
since some day we'll stage the real farce."

It sounded so threatening that the four men sat eyeing the Major, who said:

"Really I've never made anything above sergeant," but the Astrologer cut in on his explanations:

"Let's see if our friend Haffner can give us the projected costs."

"Right
...
here they are."

The Astrologer spent a few minutes leafing through the much-revised pages of numbers and explained to the gathering:

"The most solid basis for financing our organization is the chain of brothels." The Astrologer went on:

"This gentleman has analyzed for me the costs involved in setting up a ten-girl bordello. Here are the projected figures":

And he read:

"Each girl puts up fourteen pesos a week for board and has to buy her tea, sugar, kerosene, candles, stockings, makeup, soap, and perfume from the house supply."

"Total net proceeds should be two thousand five hundred pesos a month minimum. In four months we get our initial investment back. Then fifty percent of that total net proceeds will be plowed back into setting up brothels, twenty-five percent will be to cover debts, the third part to fund the cells. So do I have the go-ahead on ten thousand as an initial outlay?"

Everyone nodded assent except the Gold Seeker, who said:

"Who's the auditor?"

"After it's done we'll choose one."

"Okay."

"Okay with you, too, Major?"

"Yes."

Erdosain looked up and eyed the pseudo-sergeant's pale face, its keen eyes watching a white butterfly flutter amid the leaves, and he couldn't help but wonder how the Astrologer got people to act out all these schemes of his. But the Astrologer cut in by asking:

"You, Mr. Erdosain, how much do you need to set up your galvanoplastics works?"

"A thousand pesos."

"Ah! You're the inventor of the copper rose?" asked the Major.

"Yes."

"My congratulations. I think it will really sell. Of course, you need to metallize the flowers on a large-scale basis."

"Right. I thought of doing that along with our photography lab. That way it would be twice as cheap."

"You know best about that."

"Besides that, I have a practical friend lined up to do the galvanoplastics," he said, thinking of the Espila family, who could fit into the organization, but the Astrologer broke in on his thoughts, saying:

"Now the Gold Seeker will fill us in on the proposed location of our training camp," and the man got up.

Erdosain could hardly believe it when he saw what the man looked like. He had imagined the movie stereotype of a towering fellow with a great bushy beard smelling of strong drink. But what he saw was a far cry from that image.

The Gold Seeker was young, just about his age, his skin stretched taut over flat facial bones, very pale, with lively jet black eyes. His huge barrel chest looked like it should have been on some big burly fellow twice his size. His legs were spindly and bowed. Between his belt and pants a revolver butt was showing. His voice was ordinary, but he seemed like someone from a strange continent, cobbled together out of bits and pieces of different types of men. His face was from a shifty-eyed cardsharp, his chest was from a boxer, and his legs were from a jockey. And he really was a bizarre mixture; he just gave off an unfocused, alien aura. He had lived in the country till he was fourteen, then he shot a rustler dead, and later, fear of tuberculosis exiled him once more to the open plains, and he galloped for days and nights across unbelievable distances. Erdosain felt an immediate kinship.

The Gold Seeker took some rocks out of their wrappings. They were chunks of gold ore. Then he said:

"Here you have a certified analysis from the Mining and Hydrology Department."

The chunks passed quickly from hand to hand. A greedy gleam lit up the men's eyes and their fingers drank in the feel of quartz veined and speckled with gold. The Astrologer, slowly rolling a cigarette, could see on every face a soul-deep impact—the stones were triggering a spasm of temptation all around. The Gold Seeker sat down and said to them all:

"There's a lot of gold down there. Nobody knows about it. It's in Campo Chileno. I went down to Esquel first—all this mining equipment lying around from an old operation that went bust, then I got to Arroyo Pescado
...
I kept going
...
there, I don't know if you understand how it is, whole days count for nothing there, and I entered Campo Chileno. Jungle, sheer rainforest stretching over square kilometers. The Mask was my companion there, a prostitute from Esquel who wanted to go there because she'd been out that way before with a miner who got murdered when he got back. Down there they'll kill you over the least thing. So she had syphilis and stayed out in the jungle. The Mask. I'll never forget her! Twenty years she'd spent wandering those wild parts. From Puerto Madryn she'd go to Comodoro, then Trelew, then Esquel: She knew all the prospectors. First we went to Arroyo Pescado—that's forty leagues south of Esquel—but there was only a little sprinkling of gold dust in the sand
...
we went on for two weeks and came through the mountains to Campo Chileno."

In a clear voice, eager to make his point, the Gold Seeker told of his southern odyssey. Erdosain, as he listened, felt that he, too, was making his way through great, overlooming, icy black mountains, accompanied by The Mask, only to find they were trapped behind more triangular, purple mountains. Whole plateaus lay buried under an avalanche of forest, reddish trunks, dark green foliage, and so, abandoning all sense of reality, they plunged on under the endless, soaring sky, unfurled like a stretch of tundra across the heavens.

Very carefully, indifferent to the amazement his story had triggered among his listeners, the Gold Seeker told of his months-long adventure. They sat listening, rapt.

Then, one morning, he entered the tortuous crack that snaked through those looming mountains. On every side it was hemmed in by towering, jagged, basalt cliffs, and stalagmites rose in dark, uneven forms, while the blue sky above was tinged with infinite sadness. Stray birds flew against the great stone masses, which lay in the shadow of higher, encircling mountains. And at the lowest depths lay a lake of golden water, fed by little streamlets that trickled down from the heights.

The Gold Seeker never had known such a sinister wasteland. He stopped short when he saw that bronze-colored water mirroring tall black cliffs. The stone walls fell perpendicular there, veined with a greenish sarcoma, long streaks of malachite, and in those golden depths his pale, thick-bearded face was mirrored with its eyes turned up to the heavens.

All at once it hit him that the water held true gold, but he rejected the thought as absurd, because he'd never read or heard of anything like that, and then, he continued:

"But when I got back, one day I was in a dentist's waiting room in Rawson, I just picked up a magazine called
Medical Weekly
which was on one of the tables and started leafing through
...
and then, lightning struck. I just opened it up at random and the first thing I see is an article entitled: "Gold Water, or Colloidal Water in the Treatment of Lupus Erythematosus." I started reading it and then I found out that gold can be suspended in water in microscopic particles—this thing which was completely new to me had been discovered by the alchemists who called it "gold water." They got it by the most simple process you could imagine: throwing a glowing-hot chunk of gold into rain water. Right away I thought of that lake which before I had thought must be full of gold-colored organisms. Without realizing it, I had been right beside a lake full of colloidal gold that might have taken centuries to accumulate as water trickled down over those cliffs veined with ore. You see now what comes of ignorance? If fate hadn't put that journal in my hands, I'd never have known about that important discovery—"

"And did you go back?" the Major cut in.

"Of course. I went back eight months ago, that was when I wrote you—but I was going about it all wrong— I have to know more about extracting the gold. Besides there are solid seams of it, too
...
it needs working on still
...
send down a guy in a diver suit, because the gold is all at the bottom and the water itself is colorless."

Haffner said:

"You know all this business is interesting? Even if there's no gold, it's still got this crappy city beat."

The Major added:

"If we set up a training camp in Campo Chileno, we'll need a telegraph hookup."